This year, I’m undertaking one of my most hallowed NaNo traditions early: I’m changing the story that I’m working on.
Every year since 2010 (including 2010), I have come up with a story idea during November and then switched to it, because I didn’t like whatever it was that I was working on. Sometimes I finished my old story (though the slog through to the end of the book always slowed me down) and sometimes I just say “fuck it” and move along.
I’ve barely started preparing for this year, but my strategy was to use NaNo to do a rewrite of the story that I wrote last year/finished earlier this year. Ideally, I would have had a chance to step back and set the story up well, to do at least some planning and world building and all that jazz so that my first draft was less…shit.
I mean, it would still be shit, but more workable shit, or at least that is what I told myself.
The problem there is that I bought a house, and am still in the middle of moving, and I have (and have had) basically zero time to work on writing things (a problem for me all year, sadly). Which means I haven’t had time to do any prep work and there is no reason to assume that my second first draft of my novel would be any less shit-tastic than the first first draft.
So I think I’m changing my NaNo purpose. Instead of writing something that I care about, or that I feel at all serious about, I think I’m just going to write something fun and weird. To play, not to strive for good (or even “potential to be good after a lot of work”). Like that time that I wrote self-fanfic with all my characters trapped on a dying space station filled with killer sand.
No, really, I wrote that, and called it “The Ultimate Showdown of Mediocre Destiny”.
I have a couple of nebulous ideas of things that I could work on, though only one that is really concrete enough for me to start with (a story about a guy who accidentally becomes a superhero). I’m not that worried about coming up with new ones, though; ideas are not the hard part about writing to me (I have more than I know what to do with).
So I think I’m going to take this NaNo just to play. I’ve barely written this year, so I don’t trust myself as well to write seriously anyhow. Plus, I just want to have fun with it, not to be Mr. Serious D. Writer.
So, in short, we’ll see what I actually decide to write on this year!